They made one rule that winter, sitting by the fire after June had gone to bed. No more secrets on the place. Not the cash box in the feed room, not the CD at the bank, not the things Wade had never told her about his father. And never, ever again a secret that a child had to hold. Wade went out the next morning and took the red cash box down off the shelf over the grain bin and brought it into the house and set it on the kitchen table, and he told Claire about his father's coffee can, and the pocketknife, and the cash, and how he'd been ten when he found it and had never told a soul. She laughed until she cried. It was the first time he had heard her really laugh since October.
* * *
They branded in the third week of May, at the old Ferris corrals on the north pasture, on a morning so clear that the Little Belts stood up blue and sharp sixty miles to the west.
The Kesslers came, and Lyle Brekke's granddaughter home from college, and two families from up the creek, and by seven o'clock the fire was going and the irons were heating in it and the calves were bawling in the pen. Danny Ferris came at six-thirty in the white Ford with the green door. He had worked for Wade every weekend since January for actual wages, signed on the books and paid by check, and he had finished his sixty hours at the fairgrounds in March, and he had grown an inch and a half and filled out through the shoulders, and he roped well enough now that Wade put him on the heeling horse for the first set without saying anything about it, and then watched him out of the corner of his eye for the first ten calves and stopped worrying.
Before the first set, Wade had walked over to his pickup and taken something out from behind the seat and handed it to the boy without a speech. It was a branding iron, old and black and pitted, the handle wrapped with friction tape gone hard with age. The face of it was a lazy F over a bar. Wade had found it hanging on a nail in the Ferris barn three years ago, the week after the sale, and he had brought it home and hung it in his own tack room, meaning to do something with it, and had not. Over the winter, at the brand office in Helena, he had looked up the Lazy F Bar and found it lapsed and unclaimed. Danny had sent in the paperwork in March in his own name.
"There's a black baldy heifer calf in that pen with a notch out of her left ear," Wade said. "She's yours. Part of your wages. You'll want to mark her with something."
Danny had stood holding the iron for a while. Then he had said "Thank you, sir," in the same cracked voice he'd used by the barn in October, and turned away to put the iron in the fire, and nobody watching said a word about the way he kept his back to them for a minute after.